Well dale, the marginally higher fps gain you get from ATI now won't mean a thing when they can't run games due to the lack of a particular GPU instruction.

There are games comming out all over the place that use Pixel Shader 3.0, and I did mention that the new HDR filled "The Lost Coast" mod for HL2 won't run with the full HDR effect on any ATI cards because of the lack of Pixel Shader 3.0. Its quite ironic that what was once alled the "ATI levels" will only be available to Nvidia users.

ATI's Pixel Shader 2.0++ or whatever doens't mean a thing, it seems like game manufacturers are skipping right over it and going for 3.0, making these several hundred dollar ATI cards useless.

Honestly people, he's already bought a video card. Don't drag your propaganda in here and tell him the only way to solve his problem is to buy another card.

Any card will have trouble with 16xAA and 16xAF with all the settings jacked up in HL2, I'd personally be pleased with those FPS at those settings considering the game will still run smoothly at 40FPS.

Crank your details down a bit, you can't just turn everything WAY up and expect 100+ FPS in a very GPU/CPU intensive game to begin with.

It's actually just 12X AA (6AA X 2) but good point gaara, his card does own the uber high settings at good fps as expected. Perhaps he just doesn't have anything to compare it to so he thinks it is bad when actually that is really good.